1.47

Into the Void

New Content:

• Jez'Ra the Voidmother

• Morgrul's Mark

• New Emote

Buffs

All of these are underperforming and need some help

• Cannon Roller

• Attack cooldown: 2 > 1.8

• Crystal Sentry

• Attack cooldown: 1.5 > 1.4

• Ghast

• Attack cooldown: 3.3 > 3

• Cooldown: 3.3 > 3

• Rimargaal's Breath

• Damage: 150 > 180

• Spelldancer

• Mana Freeze: 3 > 2

• Stormy

• HP: 175 > 200

• This card has been nerfed by changes to the chain lightning, this should help bring it back to viability.

• Vuk's Clutchcooker

• Instant flamethrower after grappling hook

• Stuns minions while they are being moved with Grappling Hook

• Attempting to make Vuk less clunky to actually use.

Rebalance

• Harbinger

  • Range 14 > 12
  • Speed 4 > 5
  • Damage 250 > 275
  • The highest health flyer is also the super high damage and the longest range flyer, and has knockback... This combination makes it a noob stomper and while it has been reasonably balanced we need to get it to a different place to try to reduce its impact on the lower skill levels of the ladder. This change makes him get closer to the enemy thereby exposing himself to more counterplay, and makes him get there faster, potentially outrunning his support.

  
  

• Milloween

• Arcane Golem - Can not hit flying

• Arcane Golem - Range 8 > 4

• Arcane Golem - Timer starts on death

• Arcane Golem - No longer mythic

• Basic Attack - Damage 9 > 10

• Basic Attack - Gain an extra Arcane Charge for each spell you play (max 5)

• Basic Attack - Each charge increases basic attack sparks by 1

• Arcane Golem - Consume all Arcane Charges and gain 1 level for each

• Arcane Golem - Damage bonus per charge 3 > 5

• Arcane Golem - No longer gets bonuses when you play spells

• Perk 1 Cooldown 30 > 25

• Perk 3 - Arcane Golem gains 2 levels from each Spark (60 hp and 10 damage)

• Perk 3 - Reduce cooldown of perks 1 and 2 by 5 secs

• This borders on a complete redesign. This changes the Arcane Golem from the best ranged support to a tank that itself needs support. Also changes the dynamic of how it increases in power.

• Volco

• Swap Perks 1 and 2

• His core deck building mechanic is his ability to give rage to minions, not having that available until halfway through a match somewhat disincentivizes people from deck building around it.

Nerfs

• Apep

• Attack cooldown  2 > 2.2

• Caged Prowler

• Releases after 16 > 20

• Duration 24 > 30

• HP 400 > 360

• It's everywhere, and a very powerful value tool. This does effectively revert buffs it got in the past, but the game changed drastically since then.

• Chain Lightning

• 6 jumps > 5 jumps

• Still feels somewhat overtuned at 4 mana.

• Crakgul Doomcleaver

• Copies 3 > 2

• Everyone will have seen this one coming. A single wild card isn't actually doing that well, so we aren't going all the way on this restriction.

• Future Past

• Mana 3 > 4

• Future Present

• Mana 8 > 10

• Both the future cards are simply too good value generators and frankly probably too simple designs. This is something of a placeholder until we find time to do a better rework. They should still be playable for anyone who wants to have fun with this kind of deck.

• Mordar

• Tombstone delay 30 > 35

• Giving people more of a window where Tombstone isn't around should allow for more opportunity to exploit Mordar's "all my perks are this based around this one thing" weakness.

• Ritual of Servitude

• Can no longer summon 7 mana minion cards

• Can no longer summon 9 mana minion cards when triggered

• 8 mana minions are strong enough that it will likely still be playable activated. This frankly isn't an elegant solution, but something has to be done.

• Rocket Scrat

• Range 8 > 6

• Less likely that it will get double jumps off, might not be enough to actually bring it under control, but it should be a good start.

• Walking Blind Date

• Alternates between 3 and 4 mana cards

• This card has too few ways in which we can adjust the balance and frankly it has way too many use cases. Hopefully this brings it down to a reasonable level.

Game rule changes results

 We have an update about the game rules changes for you.

After receiving the results of the survey; analysing the response breakdowns, reading through the stacks of responses, then discussing and thinking about it for a while we have decided to keep both of the proposed changes to the rules.

• Minions cannot be played directly on bridges.

• Minions with summoning sickness cannot be pushed on to bridges.

Therefore both of these will remain in effect.

The primary basis for this decision is naturally the response breakdown which looks like this:

If we entirely ignore the people who did not notice or didn’t think they had sufficient experience(though some of these people still wrote good responses) there is a significant majority in favour of the changes. Even in the second closer poll there were a full 33% more people in favour than there were against.

When reading the responses it became clear that at least to some extent the changes actually had the positive effects we were hoping for with very few immediate negative effects. Though there is evidence that we may have somewhat overestimated the effects these changes would have, the general consensus is still that the effects were positive for the game.

There were however also valid objections to be found in the responses, as indeed there were valid objections raised in the discussions around this elsewhere.

Some central concerns that were brought up frequently can be summarised as follows:

• Over time these changes might have the effect of pushing the game further towards a rock-paper-scissors style of balance. This happens because the game has cards and strategies that require very specific counters, and there are few universal counter cards or strategies that are versatile enough to deal with a broad spectrum of threats. And these changes weaken one of the strategies which could consistently get wins against a broad spectrum of decks.

• This is a challenge the game is facing anyway, and we have some decisions to be made in the future about how we want to balance the game to address this. In fact you could argue that, even without these changes, if we didn’t find a way to address or at least mitigate this, we would still get rock-paper-scissors style balance, except one strategy would be noticeably stronger than the others. We don’t have any concrete decisions on this yet but one potential avenue could be to increase the relative strength of cards that don’t require specific counters and/or creating cards that are versatile without being difficult to counter.

• These changes have buffed the big units, causing decks to have higher mana cost averages and less card plays per match, which in turn reduces the amount of opportunities for skill expression. 

• We tried to pre-empt this with nerfs to some big units, but with the Mordar change high cost decks were all over the place. To address this we have nerfed several of the highest performing Mordar decks, and we are looking into design space for more skill expression in the future (think of more interactive low cost cards, alternative master perks you can pick during the match or alternative ways of winning a game (feedback on preferred ways to introduce more skill expression in the game is always welcome!)

• These changes removed a form of skill expression by reducing the importance of placement and timing.

• While it is true that backcapping has been (partially) removed, and that takes away that form of skill expression, the hope is that we did not remove skill expression as much as we moved it to another place, whereas you will have to do more fighting now, which could be ignored a lot more in the past.

Along with the nerf to high health minions we had also planned to increase the strength of low cost cards, but the stats have kept telling us that they are still strong, so we have not pulled the trigger on this. We are still observing, but for now it seems like, even with these rule changes, there are enough situations in most games where having a cheap card to capture the bridge is highly valuable. Because of this, their cycle efficiency, and generally being versatile traders, cheap cards are still stronger than average.

Thanks a lot to everyone who filled in the survey and contributed to this debate. We are dedicated to improving the game for years to come, so expect more initiatives to improve the core gameplay in the future!

<3 from the Minion Masters design team.

Removing premade Mayhem

In the upcoming patch we will also be removing the option to play Mayhem in premade teams. There simply are not enough premade Mayhem games being played to justify keeping it around, since it’s effectively splitting the Mayhem player pool in two and creating longer queues for everyone.

This is a triage solution, and we would love to be able to bring back premade Mayhem if/when Mayhem player numbers increase to the point where it is one again reasonable to have two separate queues.